About a year ago, the Calligra community added a new application to the suite by the name of Krita Gemini, which combined the functionality of the Krita digital painting application with the touch optimised user interface of the tablet focused Krita Sketch, into a shell with the ability to switch between the two at runtime. The goal was to create a responsive user interface for Krita, and this is now a part of Calligra. In May of this year, Intel approached the team which produced Krita Gemini with the idea of doing the same for other parts of Calligra, by creating an application which would encapsulate the Words and Stage components in the same way as Krita Gemini did for the Krita component.

Now, about half a year later, we have an application which, while rough around the edges, works for day to day use. In fact, the author of this article has been using Calligra Gemini to produce both a novel and a short story, as well as various other bits of work, and a presentation which was shown off at the Qt Developer Days 2014 in Berlin. Also worth mentioning here is that the pdf, epub and mobi versions of the short story available on the page there were also all created using Calligra Gemini, functionality which is available out of the box with Calligra.

This month the Plasma 5 team brings you 5.1.1, a bugfix release to polish up the offering. It includes all the latest translations and a bunch of bugfixes. The bugfixes include syncing settings better with kdelibs4 applications so if you select which web browser you prefer to use that will affect all KDE applications. The VDG team have also continued their impressive work with numberous tweaks to the Breeze and Oxygen styles to get those margins just right as well as improve support for right-to-left languages.

This is the first part of KDE & Freedom, a series of interviews with people who use and contribute to FOSS in their everyday lives. Please consider donating to the KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraiser. We need your help!

Franklin is a 39 year old FOSS activist based in Taipei. He has coordinated KDE's zh_TW translation team since 2006, and is the core developer of ezgo (Chinese), a compilation of educational software used by schools all over Taiwan. ezgo, which in its Linux installation uses KDE software by default, blends more than 100 free software applications into one localized, easy to use package. [More information in a previous Dot article.]

Exchanging emails led to a voice conversation between The Dot and Franklin.

What is your motivation behind computer freedom?

Many people asked me the same question. My simple answer is because I like to be free.

Before the year 2000, when we wanted to install and run an open source application, we would download the code, then there would be a file called "INSTALL" telling us how to compile and install the application. If we followed all the steps there would be a 95% chance that the compilation will fail. But then we would still have clues to find out what the problem was. We didn't need to call the vendor and ask why it's not working and have him ignore us. I like the feeling of finding the answer, no matter if it is by myself or by discussing with others on the Internet.

In Taiwan there were many excellent people working on the i18n [internationalization] framework, which made localization a lot easier. I appreciated their contributions very much, and that's also what drove me to contribute more into the open source world.

There will be a KDE exhibit at the upcoming LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference. The full conference takes place November 9 ‒ 14 in Seattle; the expo is open on the 12th and 13th. There is no charge to attend the expo.

Season of KDE is a community outreach program, much like Google Summer of Code that has been hosted by the KDE community for six years straight.

It is meant for people who could not get into Google Summer of Code for various reasons, or people who simply prefer a differently structured, somewhat less constrained program. Season of KDE is managed by the same team of admins and mentors that takes care of Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in matters for KDE, with the same level of quality and care.

Season of KDE 2014 is now open for applications. To apply head to season.kde.org register as a student and click "Submit a proposal".

As we approach the end of the year we begin the season of giving. What would suit the holiday better than giving to the entire world through the KDE Year End 2014 fundraiser?

Here is a unique way to give back to KDE allowing us to keep giving free software to humankind.

By participating in this fundraiser, you'll be part of the improvements we'll put into our educational software, so kids can have better tools for school; our office suite, so we have the best tools for the workplace; and our desktop so we can all experience a fun and productive experience when interacting with our computers.

Donating to KDE is not for you, it is for the entire world.

As a way to say thank you, starting with €30 we will send a KDE themed postcard to any given address. You will get an extra card for every additional €10 donation. Get cards for yourself and for your family and friends to show them you care for freedom. It's the perfect way to spread the festive cheer and donate to your favorite project at the same time.

Today, KDE releases Plasma 5.1, the first release containing new features since the release of Plasma 5.0 this summer. Plasma 5.1 sports a wide variety of improvements, leading to greater stability, better performance and new and improved features. Thanks to the feedback of the community, KDE developers were able to package a large number of fixes and enhancements into this release, among which more complete and higher quality artwork following the new-in-5.0 Breeze style, re-addition of popular features such as the Icon Tasks taskswitcher and improved stability and performance.

Those travelling regularly will enjoy better support for time zones in the panel's clock, while those staying at home a revamped clipboard manager, allowing you to easily get at your past clipboard's content. The Breeze widget style is now also available for Qt4-based applications, leading to greater consistency across applications. The work to support Wayland as display server for Plasma is still ongoing, with improved, but not complete support in 5.1. Changes throughout many default components improve accessibility for visually impaired users by adding support for screenreaders and improved keyboard navigation.

Aside from the visual improvements and the work on features, the focus of this release lies also on stability and performance improvements, with over 180 bugs resolved since 5.0 in the shell alone. Plasma 5.1 requires KDE Frameworks 5.3, which brings in another great amount of fixes and performance improvements on top of the large number of fixes that have gone into Plasma 5.1. If you want to help to make more of this happen, consider a donation to KDE, so we can support more developers getting together to make great software.